To begin ...

As the twentieth century fades out
the nineteenth begins
.......................................again
it is as if nothing happened
though those who lived it thought
that everything was happening
enough to name a world for & a time
to hold it in your hand
unlimited.......the last delusion
like the perfect mask of death

Friday, February 17, 2012

Reconfiguring Romanticism (53): The Construction of Poems for the Millennium & the Poems It Engendered (Part Two)

Having plunged into
a new series of poems, 50 Caprichos after
Goya, just as Poems for the
Millennium (the third, romanticism volume) was getting under way, and with
Blake’s sense of “the Fancy” and Lorca’s “duende” always in mind, I moved
toward the following concluding poem, in my terms and, I hope, in theirs:

coda, with duendes

Duendes
sound a last

hurrahthey squeeze

a
bellows, scrub a dish

with
greasy hands,

a
whisper

in
an ear bent down

to
listen.

No one sees them.

Over
every duende

falls
the shadow

of
a greater duende.

Holy moly!

Is
this not a black sound,

Mister
Lorca?

Pissing
olive oil

I
isn’t what I seems

to
bea poor

partaker

barrel
overturned,

the
wine I swigs

gone
rancid.

There
is now an end

to
everything.

What
is flesh

they
suck no more,

they
drive the foul caprichos

out
of sight.

Caprichos,
Goya, Lorca,

all
my duendes,

locked
into a cage

at
dawn, evading

sleep
& dreams,

those
whom they leave

behind
them, fathers

raising
arms

to
heaven,

screaming
through

their
empty

mouthslike caverns

black
holes

where
all light

is
lost.

Now is the
time.

If this, then, was my
interplay with Goya and Lorca, the discourse and engagement with Romanticism
was linking – deliberately on my part – with still other aspects of the poetry
I was then composing.At the turning of
the century and the millennium I had written and published a long series of
poems – A Book of Witness (2001) – in
which I explored, among other matters, the first person voice as integral to
the poetic act of witnessing, even of prophecy (itself an inheritance from
Romanticism) – by the poet directly or with the poet as a conduit for
others.I mean here a first person that isn’t restricted to the usual
“confessional” stance but is the instrument – in language – for all acts of
witnessing, the key with which, like Keats’s “chameleon poet,” we open up to
voices other than our own.There was in
all of this a question of inventing and reinventing identity, of experimenting
with the ways in which we can speak or write as “I.”In the course of putting that identity into
question, I brought in occasional and very brief first person statements by
other contemporary poets – very lightly sometimes but as a further way of
playing down the merely ego side of “I.”The continuity with the first two volumes (“modern” and “postmodern”) of
Poems for the Millennium seems to me
obvious, no less the relation to Romantic poetics (as in the case of Keats and
others), which I had still more fully to explore.

Shortly before Jeffrey Robinson and I started on our
Romantics project, I was beginning a new series of poems – fancies perhaps in the sense of Blake and Goya -- in which the
operative thrust was to suppress the “I” as it had emerged in A Book of Witness, and to let world and
mind interact absent direct first person intervention.The title I gave it, A Book of Concealments, was drawn from a medieval Jewish work, Sifra diSeni’uta, from which I also
drew, as with A Book of Witness, occasional
and very brief statements or phrases but without further citation.The idea of concealment, in contrast to that of witness, had many implications and was a driving force behind the
work as such.Not least of course was
the concealment of the singular first person pronoun, as if that in itself
might counter what Keats had called the “egotistical sublime” or Charles Olson “the
lyrical interference of the individual as ego,” a challenging if imperious directive
in the first place.

Midway through the work and with Poems for the Millennium, volume three, already underway, I
dedicated a poem to Michael McClure, with whom I had an ongoing discourse about
Romanticism and Romantics as those entered into the poetry and poetics of our
own time.The poem’s title, “A Deep
Romantic Chasm,” drawn from Coleridge’s seminal and truly fanciful Kubla Khan, led me to consider using the
Romantic poets in Millennium as I had
used the modern and postmodern poets in A
Book of Witness and to break down in other ways the barrier between the
poems in Concealments and the large
assemblage I was simultaneously composing.In the process I separated a group of poems under the title “Romantic
Dadas” and had those published as a limited edition artist’s book, but all
remained integral to A Book of
Concealments and were included as such in the final publication.The result is that the last third of the book
(25 or 30 poems) has a score or more of such insertions, as in the following,
with the Hopkins
reference noted in the margin and the title taken from a Seneca Indian ritual
source:

The
Brain Turned Upside Down

To count time from

the future,

having the end

in view,

this is a sore
reminder

of another world,

another chance

to come into the
open air,

out of the
darkness.

The brain turned upside

down,
they told us,

gathers no
moss.

No clash of symbols

half as painful

as discounted

time, ready

to plug us

one by one.

A star most spiritual,

preeminent,(G.M. Hopkins)

of all the golden press,

where what is dark

is not obscure,

leads rather

to another light,

a revelation

of the end of all.

For this things fly
away,

the distance
between

one & one

becomes a universe

no
one will track.

The time to view the stars

grows scarce,

the farther we look.

A walk across the
street

reckons infinity

& more.

Looking
back now I can only surmise that the work of assemblage and that of original
composition were, for me at least, deeply co-dependent.Certainly the poems in both Concealments and Caprichos (later published as a single book) would have been
different were I not engaged then in the construction of Poems for the Millennium.By
the same token I needed just that sort of engagement to feel myself in an
active exchange with those poets whom Jeffrey Robinson and I were weaving into
our larger composition. It is something
like this that I found years ago in Pound’s construction of “an active anthology,” and the use of the
word “active” in the title of the present volume again brings that thrust to
mind.Whatever it is that goes to create
a canon – a word and concept we could
well do without – or to perpetuate it through a canonical anthology or series
of such, an active and thereby transformative idea of anthology, as of our lives
in general, is by far the greater work to aim at.

1 comment:

Truly beautiful poem one, happiness-inducing in its jauntiness. There's this lovely minor third from that in the subject matter, but I hear caverns as caravan nevertheless. You heal your duende, his duende heals and his duende and his duende and his duende all down the line.

A PROSPECTUS

In this age of internet and blog the possibility opens of a free circulation of works (poems and poetics in the present instance) outside of any commercial or academic nexus. I will therefore be posting work of my own, both new & old, that may otherwise be difficult or impossible to access, and I will also, from time to time, post work by others who have been close to me, in the manner of a freewheeling on-line anthology or magazine. I take this to be in the tradition of autonomous publication by poets, going back to Blake and Whitman and Dickinson, among numerous others.

[For a complete checklist of previous postings through January 12, 2012, see below. The slot at the upper left can also be used for specific items or subjects. More recent posts are updated regularly here.]